From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock

What happened

HEMA, a 100-year-old Dutch retailer, turned developer portal-hopping into instant answers by building HAL, an internal AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), HAL delivers governed knowledge inside the tools teams already use, with no AWS credentials on the client and security anchored in Microsoft Entra ID.

When engineers at HEMA needed an answer, they went portal-hopping, navigating disconnected wikis, service catalogs, and IT portals to find it. To turn that friction into instant answers, the 100-year-old Dutch retailer built a knowledge layer on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore .

HEMA has over 750 stores across multiple countries, served by a technology organization of engineers, product owners, and business analysts driving digital transformation. It needed a solution that worked across roles and tools.